Nokia Lumia 720 Confirmed For Australia

Nokia's new mid-range Windows Phone will be landing in the Australian market on a variety of Vodafone and Virgin Mobile plans in the coming days. It will also be available to purchase outright for $429.

Nokia has announced that it will sell its mid-range Lumia 720 smartphone for an RRP of $429, with Virgin customers getting first dibs on 4 April. The phone will also be available from Vodafone in "the coming weeks". Retailers, meanwhile, will sell the phone from 10 April.

“With smartphone adoption continuing to grow in Australia, consumers want more choice at different price-points," said Nokia Australia’s managing director, Steve Lewis. "Smartphones like the Lumia 720 are critical to Nokia’s strategy as they allow us to bring familiar features to a wider audience.”

The Nokia Lumia 720 is being billed as the best camera phone in its price range, which is a boast that every second smartphone seems to make. Nonetheless, its imaging credentials are pretty solid, sporting Carl Zeiss optics with a spacious f1.9 aperture -- although consumers are likely to balk at the lowly 6.7MP pixel count.

Other product highlights include a 4.3in WVGA display covered in Gorilla Glass 2.0, a 1.0 GHz Dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, 512 RAM, 8GB of inbuilt Flash memory and a Micro-SD card slot for additional storage. The phone also provides 7GB of free SkyDrive storage and access to the full suite of 'HERE' applications, which includes free turn-by-turn navigation in Australia. You can view the full list of specifications at Nokia's website.

We don't normally report on every phone release, but it's interesting to see Nokia and Microsoft trying to crack the mid-tier market. If you're keen to try out the Windows Phone OS but don't want to go down the premium route, this is one of the few viable options currently available.